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| quote: | Originally posted by isoterra
there was a db rollback when the board went down earlier. loads of today's posts vanished :/ |
We got Swamper haxed 
| quote: | Originally posted by EvilTree
the big bro is after you and your cats! |
I don't think big bro would want my geriatric cat.
Where was I going with this?
I'll abbreviate rather than type it all out again.
Computers, software and society which I've drawn a rough parallel between their development and that of the music industry, electronic music scene and cultural foundations.
1980's, electronic music is fairly much being made in back rooms by people who require a lot of time and effort to sink into any kind of production, it's not overly complicated but it's foundations even as a progressive art form are well steeped in music from the past. Often the people who are coming to terms with the equipment are from a musical, more than a technical background and it does take quite a bit of talent to master them both in terms of productions.
Where, if it does get played, is in small niche communities which are a major deviation to any of the mainstream sources such as radio, television and in common record stores.
What small amount of exposure it got to the mainstream was at very best a token interest and tiny bit of airtime, anything you wanted that was a little more exotic than top 40, you had to mail away for, order in and hope it didn't get trampled in the post.
Or, you attended some kind of cultural get together, such as a night club or a rave to hear such music.
At much the same time a very naive 9 year old out in the backwater western UK, got lumped with a new-ish computer, which was an IBM 'portable' machine. About the size of a suitcase, it weighed probably more than I did, it ran DOS, had a tiny 9' screen which was an ugly shade of amber.
It also came with a manual about the size of a bible.
According to my software engineer step father and hippy mother, it was the future and I should learn to use this machine if I was to better my employment prospects after school more years than I could imagine at the time, somewhere in the far future. For my grandmother who I lived with at the time thought it was an irritating, infernal machine that had a noisy dot matrix printer and it may as well have fallen off the side of Mars as far as she was concerned.
Getting anything out of it, homework or otherwise, was an extremely cumbersome and complicated process, it did have a flight simulator game though (lol, wireframes!  )
Within the space of two generations, much had changed and most felt alienated by technology, be it computers or music or simply the cultural impact of something they couldn't get their head around. After punk died in the early 80's, electronic music became the new 'shock' to the cultural system, like punk it had it's own identity which the mainstream didn't understand and it's own following which was a very niche crowd indeed.
Development from there led to the sounds which are readily identified as a genre, Detroit techno, acid house, Goa, trance, Euro-EBM, Gabba, Italian Disco, Industrial and most which as music lovers even in the contemporary scene, will have heard of. Know where it came from and know that the people who listened to it back then where readily identified by that association.
By region
Dress
Habits
Lifestyle preferences
All those where quite easy to identify with as much as someone running around in the 70's wearing punk clothes with a mohawk. For me in the mid 90's as a somewhat confused and weird little teenager I hung out with the EBM/Industrial/Gothic crowd and with the 4ft long synthetic dreads, leather, velvet and lace, you could quite easily get an idea of what I was into as far as music.
It was much the same with people who used computers, the Mac, IBM, Amiga crowds never really mingled much together, while they where not exactly adopting any kind of readily identifiable dress code or anything. They never really talked much because there was no medium they could share.
Mediums like a musical preference also didn't mix, you turned up at a industrial club in Adidas, they wouldn't let you in, correspondingly you didn't do the same with hip-hop or house clubs, (probably because they'd eat you.. haha!)
In the late 90's, 00's, those barriers are all gone.
Which has a lot of pro's, the music is available with such convenience and ease it's virtually (in the literal sense) everywhere you can get an internet connection.
It doesn't care what brand of computer or the OS you use either.
You don't have to go to clubs, raves, pirate radio, niche record stores and so on to hear it, they still exist but such things are being a marginalised outlet as far as the medium goes.
You don't have to if you're producing this music, be anywhere near a label to be heard either, the medium is completely electronic and the diversity of music is also increasing from these individuals.
The listener, not the record label, determines what they want to hear and from whom.
The con's however are somewhat more subjective.
The culture shock is coming back in where people like journalists and record companies have woken up one day to find their demographic has changed in under the space of 10 years.
For most, they're struggling to both sell to a demographic which neither wants or needs them and for the journalist who increasingly finds their subject matter being a nebulous, fast moving creature which doesn't exactly stick to any conventional genre.
The music itself, is finding it hard also to stick into a defined genre, rather than creating a genre like the acid house, Goa, Detroit techno or any of those things, it doesn't necessarily have an association like it's predecessors did. As a result, there's a lot of the bandying about of words like 'progressive' which get tacked onto anything which is cross-genre.
Are these bad things?
Not really, in a sense individuals, rather than anyone else are at a point in history where they can make that personal choice of music based only on what they like. It need not be a peer, company or media group which is exposing it.
I think a lot of the traditional mediums of music will find themselves more and more marginalised in the coming 10 years as their demographic is gone and internet connections, speeds allow people to access music as easily as flicking on the radio or TV.
Ultimately, they're going to fight, they will lose though, much like the journalists who write are going to find it extremely hard to give certain types of music an association. It doesn't mean the music is bad either if it adopts that 'prog' title, it just means it doesn't have a ready identification to it to label and I think it will become and increasingly murky form of genre... once people run out of times they can actually tack-on the term 
Isolation in a sense that the connection of listener/producer not having much of an association though, remains to be seen. Over several periods of history people produced music without a direct involvement with how it was played, Beethoven certainly wasn't always a conductor at orchestras and neither was he playing he piano there.
After he was gone, if someone decided to swap in some woodwinds instead of strings, people didn't call it progressive classical, if someone now throws in synthesisers and bashes a gong instead of kettle drum, it's still just going to be classical at the end of the day.
Electronic music I think has enough of an identity to perhaps distance itself from regional, genre labelling as it has been around for some time now, much as classical is readily identified as being distinct sound, regardless of whether it was made in the 15th or 19th century.
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